Template talk:Internet Archive author

"scanned books original editions color illustrated"
I'm impressed by your work on this template. I don't really understand the bit of the output in parentheses though, "scanned books original editions color illustrated". Colour illustrations don't seem to me to be a particularly prominent feature of IA's collections, as most of the books there are out-of-copyright works that pre-date widespread use of colour printing. I'm not sure they're all "original editions" either. How about something simpler and closer to how [//archive.org/details/texts archive.org/details/texts] describes itself, such as "Works by or about at the Internet Archive's digital books collections"? Qwfp (talk) 18:43, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Yes part of the goal of this template is to make changing the coda in 1 place instead of thousands. The current coda is just what I had been using for years when adding the URLs manually. The scans are mostly color scans. Compare with the scans from Google Books which are B&W, these are color scans (the pages are yellow like the paper). The purpose of the "color" was to set it apart from Google Books (ie. higher quality), and the "scanned" to set it apart from Gutenberg and other ascii-text (and epub etc) digital books collections. The illustrations, there were recently millions of illustrations from IA uploaded to Flickr.
 * With all that said there's something to say about simplicity and a clean look. In truth IA and Gutenberg have crossed lines and now offer more than the traditional scanned book vs ascii text. And they have been around long enough most people know what they are. It might be best to just have no coda by default, it would reduce clutter in the External links sections. It would match the look of Gutenberg author which has no coda. For Librivox author I would keep the (free audiobooks) coda since that is less well known. These three templates usually stack next to each other and look best when uniform in look and style. I can add an option for a custom coda.
 * Qwfp, if you have spare time :) and want to help adding new templates, there are probably 20 thousand authors who could us it, but currently only about 900 have it. The rest have to be added manually. I wrote a tool called WP:ELD to find those authors but it's a manual process of adding the template since it's very difficult to automate adding a new entry to External links. Choose a Category: of interest (eg. 19th century Russian novelists), run the ELD report for it. That way it's small pieces here and there as time and interest allow. -- Green  C  19:44, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
 * To clarify, I think it needs a bit more than just say "Works by or about at Internet Archive", as Internet Archive also archives websites, audio, and moving images, but the search generated by this template doesn't include those, only what IA classifies as 'texts'. I'm not sure what the best description of this for the template's output would be though — "texts", "digital book collection", "digitized printed materials", something else?


 * Possibly the template could usefully be expanded to cover those other media types though, perhaps with an optional 'mediatype' parameter? I noticed this template as you added it to the article on the composer Edward Elgar, which is on my Watchlist. IA holds quite a few audio recordings of his works that don't come up from the search currently generated by this template, but simply changing "mediatype:(texts)" to "mediatype:(audio)" in the text string appears to work. Qwfp (talk) 20:41, 11 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I see. Let me investigate and think about it. IA is currently running slowly and I need to do some tests to see what kind of false positives are returned with a broader search. I kept it focused on the texts collection to avoid too many false positives. There is so much stuff in the other collections I'm afraid the false positive problem will make searches less than desirable for the majority of the cases who don't have audio/video works. -- Green  C  21:12, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

The script is updated. The template by default will do a broad search in all media collections: texts, audio and video. If that produces too many false positives, there are three ways to customize the search: 1. Via the "media" option which you suggested above. 2. By changing the search id ("sname"). and 3. A custom search string which can be anything. The script is now generic enough for anyone (musician, film director, etc..). It might be worth renaming the template but not sure what to replace "author" with. Perhaps "artist" or "person". Thanks for the feedback. -- Green  C  21:48, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Why IA vice OL?
Interesting work here, but perhaps some discussion would be in order. Why choose IA author over OL author if all the IA records are reproduced in OL? For many users, site access to IA is policy blocked either for security reasons or for supposedly offensive content. The insistence of IA on pushing flickering images at users also represents a (rather bizarre) accessibility problem. LeadSongDog come howl!  16:24, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * IA is an archive of books, like a local library. OL is a catalog of books, like WorldCat, it's meant to catalog all books every made, not just those at IA. They are two separate things. Further while OL does list books that are located at IA, they also include many commercial and other books not at IA. Also OL's listings are not always complete, the searches used here are more accurate. -- Green  C  18:17, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Request for an edit
Greetings and felicitations. Would an authorized user please be so kind as to change the output from "Works by or about X at Internet Archive" to "Works by or about X at the Internet Archive". This would bring it into accord with the usage of the "Internet Archive" article. —DocWatson42 (talk) 08:48, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Might you be so kind? —DocWatson42 (talk) 01:39, 24 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think you should be able to do this yourself. While the template is protected, the module is free to be edited. In Module:Internet Archive, just update the   row. -- WOSlinker (talk) 07:56, 24 October 2018 (UTC)


 * My preference would be without "the" because these sorts of things are not meant to be grammatically correct complete sentences, brevity is a factor. The "Internet Archive" article isn't really authoritative, just how someone did at it at some point, there are no talk page discussions explaining a rationale. The archive.org website does not use the when referring to itself. --  Green  C  16:12, 25 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I disagree about brevity—four more characters (including the space) is not much of a burden. Also, the site's "About" page does use the definite article when referring to the site, in five of the five self references (including one in the sidebar).  I discount the title of a press release, as that follows headline format. ( I just tested it, and you seem to be correct (thanks!), but having found GreenC's dissent I thought I work towards consensus.) —DocWatson42 (talk) 04:35, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
 * It increases the tagline word count by a third (33%). It's a personal preference or matter of style, the use of "the" is optional throughout the archive.org website and other secondary sources. We generally don't change things for personal style preferences, particularly when it adds unnecessary text in a brief message area. Looking at other external link templates, generally most of them don't use "the", either, meaning it would go against the prevailing (though not universal) style in template tag lines. The principle is to keep tag lines as brief as possible while conveying accurate information and keeping consistency across templates. -- Green  C  16:42, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 4 April 2019
To be grammatically correct, this should read either "at the Internet Archive" or "at archive.org". —Hugh (talk) 01:03, 4 April 2019 (UTC)


 * "at Internet Archive" is in-line with other external link templates, like Project Gutenberg and LibriVox. These shorthand taglines are meant to be brief and not grammatical sentences though even by convention we often omit "the" when speaking of Internet Archive. -- Green  C  01:41, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Use outside of Wikipedia?
I'd like to use this template on my own install of Mediawiki. I'm getting 'Lua error in Module:Internet_Archive at line 573: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).'

I know my own install of Mediawiki can't access wikibase. But I'm not sure it's necessary for this module to access wikibase. If I include the sname, birth & death dates in the template, can it create the search URL without accessing wikibase?

This is how the template is being called.

Thank you. Redheadkelly (talk) 22:08, 19 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Rename "function p.bdDate" --> "function p.bdDateOld" and rename "function p.bdDateAlt" --> "function p.bdDate" -- Green  C  02:28, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Template information for visual editor
If we can add a  section to the documentation, that will dramatically increase usability for the template when using the new editor. I just added this template to Ameen Rihani bibliography and found that I had to dig through the documentation to find out how to use dname as a parameter to avoid issues there; if you look at Template:StandardEbooks, you can see what this would look like, and if you try adding it to a page in the visual editor, you can see that it makes it easier to know what information should be added to achieve the desired result.

I'm happy to do the work to add this, but since I didn't create this template, I wanted to check with others who are better informed before doing so. It looks like is the person paying the most attention to this template. Smith (talk)  10:47, 21 June 2023 (UTC)


 * User:ACB Smith: Yes I conceived, wrote and maintain the template and documentation. All arguments are optional, by default it can be  and it will produce results. Usually you want to also include at least Article title to lock in the search name (sname ie. search name) against future page moves. The rest of the optional parameters are explained in the docs. If you want to create templatedata that would be great. I don't know anything about it. Happy to work with you on this. --  Green  C  16:08, 21 June 2023 (UTC)